10/24/11

12 October 2015

The Mysterious World of "Secret Sites"

Clairvoyant infodumps target seemingly random people.

Somewhere
in a Los Angeles apartment, a 21-year-old woman is interrupted in the
midst of conversation by the ping of her smartphone’s notification
system. She politely excuses herself from her party, buzzing with
excitement over what she expects to see on her device—and there it is:
an otherwise unidentifiable is.gd-shortened
link. She races home to her laptop, clicks open her browser and reads.
She is one of the lucky few and she knows it. She is on the Secret Site
Listserv. She is, as they call themselves, a “Siter”.

This
young lady (we’ll call her Amber), who spoke to Dispatches on condition
of anonymity, received her first Secret Site email last November. The
introduction to the listserv was short and sweet: “You, Amber [last
name], are one of the lucky few identified as important enough to
receive an invitation to discover things that will be popular tomorrow.
The art, culture, politics, science, and technology found in these links
is mostly unknown today, but will soon explode onto the scene. You are
among those privileged to be the first to know.”

The
links to the Secret Sites are actually links to entries on a site
called Quick Forget, a favorite site for sharers of clandestine
information. The links from Quick Forget disappear forever after they’re
viewed, and the pages themselves appear to be on randomly generated IP
Addresses. These pages all look the same: Clean, gray text on a dark
blue background, each with a bold, unhelpful title: Dump, Repository,
Heap, Stuff, etc.

Amber
recounts her first experience with the Secret Sites: “I was sure this
was some kind of prank or marketing pitch or something, but of course I
couldn’t help myself. The creepy part was the email was right—all the
stuff I saw on the site was stuff I’d never heard of, but within, like, a
month, I saw all of it on the news or on Twitter or Facebook,” she told
us.

At
the beginning, Amber recalls, she was worried about sharing the
information from the secret sites—she was afraid that if the Sender
(Siters tend to capitalize “Sender”) found out that she was spilling
information, she would be cut off from the listserv.

“I
found a forum one time, in the comments section of an article I saw about the Site, just for Siters. I went on and found out there were dozens of
us. It freaked me out. All I could think was ‘What if the Sender finds
this, you guys?’ A couple of weeks later the forum had been taken down,
and I was just glad I never posted on it. I don’t want to lose my
connection.”

The
desire to share, however, beat out her initial fears, and she’s begun
posting content from the Site on her Twitter feed. She says she has no
idea why the Sender chose her specifically: “I’m just a normal college
student. There’s nothing interesting about me, and I only have, like, 200
Twitter followers. I’ve never been famous or even really that popular.”

The
Site information she shares, however, has made a few waves. Amber tells
the story of when one of her posts was retweeted by a major political
commentator: “So, I posted a Reuters story about the French Parliament
talking about lifting the burqa ban. The Site said that the ban would be
lifted before the end of the month, so that’s what I posted. And this
guy, [name redacted], who I later found out was pretty famous, RTed me
and said something like ‘Wishful thinking, friend.’ And then, two weeks later they
voted and the ban was over.”

Dispatches
has contacted dozens of leads in the pursuit of this story, and all of
them except Amber have led down the same two paths: the supposed Siters
we’ve contacted turned out to be frauds or dupes, or real Siters we’ve
reached out to have been flatly unwilling to talk to the media. And they
all have the same reason: The Sender.

Nobody
knows who the Sender could be, and if curious Siters have any
clues, they aren’t sharing them with anyone. A recent Wired post suggests a
few likely suspects: SEO companies experimenting with secret branding,
political parties, internet entrepreneurs, or even governmental
organizations. But no one has a solid lead.

“I
have no clue,” said Amber when we asked her, “but whoever it is is pretty damned smart.”